A Boot Camp for G.O.P. Freshmen

By JERRY GRAY

Published: January 27, 1996

BALTIMORE, Jan. 26—
The freshmen who marched into Washington at the head of the Republican revolution a year ago met here today for a midterm retreat, where they planned to lick their wounds from a year of battles and to gather strength for another charge at big government. Instead, they heard themselves lambasted by conservative hard-liners, whose visions made even the sternest among them blink.

A year has gone by and almost none of the ambitious Republican agenda has become law, speaker after speaker thundered this morning, as the freshmen and some sophomores listened, seemingly in shock. Others on the program said the Republicans should never have relented on their strategy of forcing the Federal Government to shut down to force President Clinton to accept the Republican budget.

When you had the Government down, you should have left it down," Al Dunlap, a conservative who is the chief executive of the Scott Paper Company, told the Republican lawmakers at a midmorning meeting. The strategy was hurting Republicans in the polls, Mr. Dunlap acknowledged, but they still should have held fast.

"No job is worth having that isn't worth losing for doing the right thing," he said.

While those who spoke at the retreat did not mention Speaker Newt Gingrich by name, some of their anger was apparently directed at the Speaker, who has deferred action on issues unpopular with many lawmakers but dear to the hearts of conservatives, like term limits.

About 50 of the 73 Republican freshmen and 14 of the sophomores in the House arrived in Baltimore on Thursday evening for the two-day retreat, organized by two conservative groups, the Heritage Foundation, a research center, and Empower America, a public-policy organization. They brought in a number of conservatives, including William J. Bennett, the former Education Secretary and drug czar who is a founder of Empower America; Edwin J. Feulner Jr., president of the Heritage Foundation; Dr. Wade Horn, director of the National Fatherhood Initiative, and Ben Wattenberg, the syndicated columnist and moderator of the weekly public television program "Think Tank."

In many ways the experience for the freshmen was like a Marine boot camp -- they were being ripped apart from the outset by tough-talking drill instructors, but left with the notion that they are invincible.

"You haven't gone too far -- we've barely done anything yet," Mr. Bennett said in the keynote speech Thursday night. "You've just started this thing. They will talk about how harsh you are and how mean you are, and you've just got to hold your ground."

With Democrats holding their own in the Senate and Mr. Clinton proving wilier than the Republicans had anticipated, the heady times they enjoyed in the first 100 days of the 104th Congress, when they began to enact their Contract with America, has given way to near gloom during the budget battle.

"A lot of people came in with unrealistic expectations on what could be accomplished," said Representative Phil English, a freshman from Pennsylvania.

Another freshman, Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, said: "I think the class, over all, is still optimistic. But the dose of reality is that I don't think everybody understood how masterful the President is and how well he does on the pulpit."

The sponsors billed the event as an opportunity for the Republican underclassmen to get away as a group from the rarefied political air of nearby Washington to exchange ideas and reset their agenda.

Beyond that, the gathering was an effort by conservative forces that are now fretting about the Congressional leadership of Senator Bob Dole and Mr. Gingrich to jump start the conservative political revolution, with the underclassmen again providing the spark.

"You have got to get a C.E.O. who believes in you," said Mr. Dunlap, the Scott Paper executive, "and it's not Bob Dole. Bob Dole is yesterday. The Senate is yesterday. You are tomorrow."

Representative Dick Armey of Texas, the House majority leader who in recent weeks has come to rival Mr. Gingrich as the conservative standard-bearer among the freshmen, paid an unannounced visit to the gathering to deliver a brief pep talk, telling his troops not to be discouraged by recent setbacks.

"Think of it as a video tape you are watching," Mr. Armey said, "and the most powerful man in the world, the President of the United States, has his finger on the pause button. But he can't hit the stop button."

Together, the 73-member freshman class and the 48 members of the sophomore class provide more than half of the 236 Republican votes in the House of Representatives.

A little more than a year ago, just after they were elected and before the 104th Congress opened with its Republican majority, the incoming freshmen gathered in the same place, the Lord Baltimore Hotel, to hear some of the same speakers lay out the battle plan for the conservative revolution and to sing praise for the wave of eager new foot soldiers. This year there was no escaping the somberness that hung over most of today's sessions.

"I keep hearing how we failed and how we are getting beat up," said Representative Sam Brownback, a freshman from Kansas. "I don't think we have."

Sandwiched between a prayer breakfast this morning and a bus ride back to Washington late this afternoon, the Republican underclassmen attended public sessions on "Government Downsizing," "Empowering Citizens" and "Strengthening America's Families and Culture." At each public meeting, they got healthy dosages of advice before retreating to private caucuses to ingest it in what a member called "quite candid" discussions.

The underclassmen said that they did not expect to draw up a complete new agenda here, but they were clearly leaving Baltimore with the intent of pushing their revolution onto battlefields that their leadership has so far avoided, including term limits.

"I would encourage you to be far bolder than you have been," Jim Miller, a budget director in the Reagan Administration and now the counselor for Citizens for a Sound Economy, told the lawmakers in the session on reducing government. "You have to cut back, cut back, cut back that monster."

Mr. Dunlap caused the room to fall silent when he said the Republicans should try to balance the Federal budget immediately instead of over the seven years sought by their leadership.

"You ought to do it in one year," said Mr. Dunlap, who was described in his biographical sketch as "Rambo in pinstripes" because of the way he cut costs and the staff at Scott Paper.

"A seven-year balanced budget will fail," he asserted. "In seven years the characters will change, the mood of the people will change."

Photo: Republican freshmen and sophomores in the House gathered inBaltimore for a two-day conference on how to revive their conservative agenda. They had plenty of reading material to keep them busy. (Scott Robinson for The New York Times)